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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27151 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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I've never accused him of being concise and clear, or having a point.

Why can't we all just get along?

Am I supposed to sob in horror at the idea of replacing humans with soulless automata instead?

Well, it's less humans, and more you in particular. It's also less about sobbing in horror, and more about whether you see much of a difference between the two cases. I think the question is interesting given Rat ideas on uploading consciousness.

There's about a zero percent chance that Hlynka doesn't know about my enthusiasm for the potential of mind uploading, with me seeing such an emulation of a human mind as equivalent in every way that matters to me as the same as a biological human.

That is not the same as replacing a human with a LLM trained on the corpus of their text, with outputs indistinguishable from the human. You'd need to do way more to establish it as a high fidelity replication of the original consciousness, even if I think in principle it's doable.

I don’t know that it is, and I think in time we’ll come to understand that training an advanced LLM on our personalities and actions is ‘mind uploading’ in the science fiction sense.

I agree that in principle, it is possible to emulate a complex system to within the limits of observation and random error by treating it as a blackbox and then training on its outputs or response to stimuli.

After all, in ML, that's already a thing in the form of teacher-student distillation, where you train a new neural net to be indistinguishable from another by feeding it the latter's outputs.

I still don't think that just training on a corpus of text written by a human is sufficient to reproduce said human, maybe if you had an enormous amount of video, audio and other biometrics. It's arguably better than nothing as a form of immortality, but I personally expect more. If it can be demonstrated that such a technique is somehow equivalent to mind uploading via scanning, then I'll have no objections.

I agree there are some important multimodal steps left, but they’re all happening pretty quickly. I think people will be stunned how well they can be captured just by training on their linked social media and text message data when that becomes easily available. Since most people are very similar, and even ‘personality quirks’ are often repeated, it’s likely that the tuning required is less than one might expect. Personalities aren’t actually very unique.

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